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Board Design Moves Beyond Reach of In-Circuit Testers
October 30, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 1 minute
In just the last five years, the advancements in microprocessors, communications chips, memory and other base technologies have been phenomenal. Circuit board design and assembly techniques have changed accordingly to accommodate the many breakthroughs in base technologies. Consequently, these new design and assembly techniques are wreaking havoc on the test coverage previously provided by intrusive test technologies like ICT.
Fortunately, non-intrusive board test (NBT) has emerged as a more cost-effective test methodology for the manufacturing floor. Certainly, ICT and other intrusive test technologies, such as manufacturing defect analyzers (MDA) and flying probe testers (FPT), will continue to have their place, but they soon could be relegated to special case testing or for testing rudimentary circuit board designs. NBT offers better test coverage and a lower cost structure.
Specifically, today’s sophisticated board design techniques do not provide physical access for probes, which is a requirement of ICT. What’s more, system and board designers don’t want to provide ICT access. At best, designing in tests pads to give probe access to a circuit board could slow system performance to unacceptably low levels; at worst, the system’s ability to function as specified could be placed in jeopardy.
From a business perspective, ICT systems are expensive to procure, maintain and operate. Complex bed-of-nail test fixtures are time-consuming to produce and costly. Many new product introductions have been delayed because engineers had no other choice but to wait weeks at a time for ICT test fixtures to be produced for each re-spin of a board design. The alternative is NBT, a suite of technologies that provide comparable or better test coverage at less cost and are software-driven, not hardware-intense. Read the full article here.Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the September 2013 issue of SMT Magazine.